An augmented reality application provides an output presentation which combines information captured from the environment with supplemental information. For example, one type of augmented reality application presents an image of the environment, together with labels that annotate objects within the image. Another type of augmented reality application provides an animated character which duplicates the movement of a human user, together with a virtual object with which the user may interact.
Any application that captures information from the surrounding environment raises privacy concerns. For example, the above-described augmented reality applications capture images or videos of the environment; that information, in turn, can potentially include sensitive items, such as human faces, personal writing, account numbers, etc. The “owner” of this private information will often prefer or insist that the information is not released to others. The owner of this private information may correspond to the person using the augmented reality application or someone else, such as a bystander, who is impacted by this technology. The above-described privacy concerns are not unique to augmented reality applications, but extend to any application which captures perceptual information from the environment. Such applications are referred to herein as environment-sensing applications.
In practice, an application developer may create an environment-sensing application as a “one-off” self-contained unit of code. In doing so, each developer may address the above-described privacy concerns in a separate—typically ad hoc—manner, within the application code itself, if this problem is addressed at all.